[packagekit] Things that need fixing

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 14:02 -0500, Robin Norwood wrote:
> This seems a little funny to me for some reason.  I think it's because
> of my background with webapps - for instance, whenever you see someone
> putting a bunch of separated values in a single column in a DB table,
> you know they're Doing It Wrong.  OTOH, it's nice to be able to pass
> additional data around without breaking the API...

Sure, it's just the same stuff we pass as a filter. We could do the same
as an "as" signature - it's just less hassle to pass as a well formed
string. I guess you've got the draw the line somewhere between
correctness and API ease of use.

> [snip more good stuff]
> 
> > * Ability to select updates in the update viewer - it would appear
> > that davidz was right, as now real world users are asking for it.
> 
> Don't tell him, you'll just encourage him.  I think we should add
> checkboxes For Now, until someone figures out how to do it better in
> various backends.  Then we can add the 'do the right thing' button.

Well, DTRT should be done in UpdateSystem.

> > * We need to pass in string arrays of package_id's to a method so we
> > can install, remove or update multiple things in one transaction. We
> > need this for the above. We can either do this in a general purpose
> > method (so we can do clever stuff as a compound method) or extend the
> > existing ones.
> > 
> > Something like ActionPackage(tid, a(ss)) where a(ss) is array of [role
> > and package_id] seems most clean. This way we can do clever stuff (not
> > the common case) without breaking all the existing code.
> 
> I don't like this at all.  The backend is going to need to handle each
> of the possible cases differently, and might not (yet) support a given
> action over multiple packages.  With something generic like this,
> there's no way to say "I support upgrading, or installing a
> bunch of packages, but not downgrading or removing" for instance.

Sure, valid point.

Richard.